Wasn't sure where to put this, so I put it here.
I want to paint a handful of engine room crew for my gunboats. I'm planning to use some of the more generic sailors I have (ones without hats and such), and paint them in a generic manner. This is so I can try and get away with just painting one set for now, rather than one for each of the three or four navies that I game with. So I thought, I know, I'll just have them covered in coal dust so you can't really see the uniforms.
So for one thing I'm after is ideas for painting such fellows so they don't just look like they've fallen in a bucket of black paint.
The other thing is that they are mostly for gaming the Great War (but maybe will double as Victorians, too). By then oil-powered steamers were all the rage, rather than coal. Am I right in thinking that? Would an oil-fuelled boiler's crew even be black from head to foot? Something makes me doubt that. Would gunboats and such in colonial backwaters have oil boilers anyway?
I've never been in the engine room of a steamer. How'd you reckon I should paint these fellows? I really want them to look different to the Bristol Fashion deck hands and gunners in their pristine tropical whites up on deck.